Monday 25 August 2008 19.01 EDT
First published on Monday 25 August 2008 19.01 EDT

During the opening minutes of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Her Naked Skin, I prepared myself for emotional breakdown. I knew this was a play about the suffragettes and about the price women had paid so that an ungrateful schmuck like me could have a voice. As the lights went down, I already felt guilty: at what I take for granted, at my frequent lack of political engagement, at my ignorance. I was ready to learn, to feel bad, to atone, even.

Three hours later, however, I found myself dry-eyed, disappointed and still knowing very little about the suffragette movement. Had I missed something?

In all the advance publicity, and in the 18-page history of the suffragettes in the National Theatre's accompanying programme, Her Naked Skin has been portrayed as a political play, an exciting new feminist piece. It is neither of these things. Instead, it is a play about a doomed - and, frankly, unbelievable - upstairs-downstairs lesbian romance, played out against a suffragette backdrop.

Of course, it is thrilling - if also shocking - that for the first time an original play by a living female writers is being staged at the National's Olivier theatre. Our women writers certainly deserve all the encouragement they can get: Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National, says that of the thousand-plus unsolicited plays he receives every year only 20% are by women.

This makes Her Naked Skin even more of a wasted opportunity. The first play by a contemporary female writer on the National's main stage could have been crackling with ideas and political debate. And it starts well: the first character we see is the suffragette Emily Davison, pinning her hat in place and staring in the mirror for the last time before she sets off for the Epsom Derby on June 4 1913. As she disappears into the darkness, a wall of screens lights up overhead, playing grainy film footage of the horses galloping down the track and over Davison's body. The noise and confusion are terrifying, and for a moment you imagine yourself in her place.

After that, the magic is gone. The next three hours follow the increasingly cliched romp between two fictional suffragettes: the youthful Eve Douglas (Jemima Rooper), a cor-blimey machinist from Limehouse, and the middle-aged Lady Celia Cain (Lesley Manville), a plum-in-the-mouth aristocrat desperate to escape her husband and children. The play seems to forget it ever had any politics. Yes, we see the prison conditions the suffragettes endured, the tensions between husband and activist wife, the rows in the House of Commons. But at no point does anyone attempt to explain why these women wanted the vote so badly they were prepared to risk their lives for it.

Perhaps the biggest insult is the forcible feeding scene, in which a doctor appears to insert a tube up a prisoner's nose and down into her stomach, while a nurse pours egg and brandy down a funnel. Apparently, this has caused someone to faint in the audience nearly every night. One blogger reported that six people walked out of the performance she attended. It is offensive not because it is unpleasant to watch - which it is - but because the playwright's chosen victim is, predictably, Eve. The audience sympathises with her not because of her political views (of which we know nothing), but because she is Celia's girlfriend. Celia is, of course, exempt because she is posh. But would it have been historically inaccurate to choose the oldest and most radical of the suffragettes, Florence (played by the brilliant 73-year-old Susan Engel), to act out this horror?

Lenkiewicz's characters have no real political beliefs - bizarre in a play about the suffragettes. This is especially irritating as the production itself is excellent: the staging is innovative and exciting, and the performances mesmerising, far better than the play deserves. But not even acting of this calibre can disguise the hollowness at its centre. We don't even get to find out exactly why Florence - loud, strong, intractable - joined the campaign.

Those clues we do get about what inspired and drove these women only undermine the entire suffragette movement. Florence worries that Eve has joined protests because she likes the glamour and the drama, the public disorder and the arrests. Lady Celia's motives are even more suspect: in one scene, she screams that women only become suffragettes because they are, like her, "all lost souls". Are we seriously supposed to believe that women would put themselves through repeated imprisonment and forcible feeding just because they were a bit lonely and a bit lesbian? The charge would be insulting if it weren't already so familiar: sexually frustrated, man-hating, child-despising, closet lesbians, publicity-seeking drama queens - people have been saying this about feminists for decades.

Perhaps the problem with any notion of feminist theatre is that it is an impossible label to live up to. Much of the best theatre to have tackled feminist issues doesn't advertise the fact. Chekhov and Ibsen both wrote beautifully about feminist yearnings long before the word was invented. In recent years there have been some great performances on the London stage that, sometimes unwittingly, inspire you to question and explore feminist ideas: Julia Stiles in David Mamet's Oleanna at the Garrick theatre, as a student who accuses her professor of sexual harassment; Billie Piper as a woman who experienced domestic violence in Christopher Hampton's Treats, also at the Garrick; Flora Spencer-Longhurst as the tomboy Frankie in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, at the Young Vic. These plays engaged with their characters' discomfort with their gender in a way Her Naked Skin does not.

Perhaps some suffragettes were only marginally interested in politics. But do these indifferent, sexed-up hangers-on have to be the focus of the Olivier's first play by a woman writer? As it is, it feels like a formula is at work: focus on the personal; don't challenge people with too much political information; throw in some class tension; spice it up with some hot lesbian action and a spot of forcible feeding. Surely the suffragettes deserve better than this.